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Dye Launched ‘Second Golden Age’
By John Hopkins
Martin Ebert, who may be described as the hottest golf course architect in Europe following the success of his work at Royal Portrush before last year’s Open and at Trump Turnberry, never met Pete Dye but knows the significance of Dye’s work.
“To me, he was the king, wasn’t he?” Ebert said in the wake of Dye’s passing last week. “He was allowed to do whatever he wanted to do, whatever that meant and whatever the consequences of that were. People accepted that.
“I have come to golf course architecture from playing these great old links. They are what motivated me. Pete Dye was obviously motivated by the same set of courses. Those journeys he made over to the British Isles to take away the inspiration to produce sleepered bunkers for example. I think his marks were inventiveness and imagination. His imagination was inspired by the greats of the links.
“When I look at the variation of his work I could not even imagine that you could produce so many different types of golf courses but clearly that was driven by a love of the old traditional links.
“I went to Harbour Town, which he designed with Jack Nicklaus. I found it really weird. The ninth green was a horseshoe green with a bunker in the middle. You miss the green left or right and the flag is on the other side and it’s a wedge over the bunker. I just couldn’t get it. I couldn’t understand it.
“His imagination was incredible. I would design things by plans. He would be out there on the excavators developing it in a much more organic way.”
Martin Ebert
“Why are there a thousand or more bunkers on the course at Whistling Straits? Yet when I looked at the old pictures of our links there was so much more sand involved through the landscape and that is what he was trying to re-create.
“His imagination was incredible. I would design things by plans. He would be out there on the excavators developing it in a much more organic way. I would love to have that same ability to do that. For me the definition of him is he pushed the boundaries and made people think. Not necessarily good; not necessarily bad. Some really, really weird stuff, some really, really brilliant stuff.
“There is no doubt in the business of golf his name sold the green fees. Is it good, is it bad, is it great, is it stupid? You don’t want something bland and mundane and he never produced that. He always produced something that was thought-provoking.
“Kiawah Island was one of the ones I thought was brilliant. I played there just after the (1991) Ryder Cup and I thought it was more of a links than many of our links. You could putt from around the greens. I thought the shaping was incredible.
“He wasn’t afraid to make a mark on the landscape and produce a new landscape. I don’t necessarily think it looked as though it had always been there or should have been there but it created an incredible place to play golf. Sometimes very penal. Sometimes, in terms of the maintenance, impossible.
“Some other courses were perhaps too penal, certainly overly penal for the pros to complain so vociferously. He was quite happy to make changes subsequently. That island green (at TPC Sawgrass) has inspired a change at one of our Open venues. The aim is to get something very very exciting at the culmination of one of the Opens. I can’t tell you any more about that. You will find out soon enough.
“It was more than a job for him. It was his life, his family, it was everything. He would sit on that machine and do the work himself and he has inspired … when you go back and think how many architects were inspired by St Andrews and Old Tom Morris and how many came out of the Old Tom Morris school. You can see how those tentacles spread out. Similarly with Pete Dye. He has been another originator of a big spread of architects.
“First there was the Golden Age of Harry Colt, Tom Simpson, Dr Alister MacKenzie and people like that. Then there was a bit of the Dark Ages. He was the start of the second Golden Age of architecture. The missing link between those of the Golden Age and the start of the second age was that the people working then did not have the ability, the knowledge or the perception to travel to the British Isles to look at things. He did. In the Golden Age it was going out from the British Isles to spread the game. Then America knew it all but then he came along and he had the understanding and the knowledge to say to himself, ‘I need to go back to the home (of golf) to work out what to do.’ Those two golden ages – Old Tom at St Andrews spawned so many and Pete Dye started the second Golden Age. He was the father of modern golf architecture.”